by Martin Amis
Osric in funds: this photograph, which was taken in a spare office at the TLS, appeared on the back flap of The Rachel Papers (1973).
Philip and Martin in the outdoor sink, when we were poor. I am perhaps putting my father on record about combat between killer whales and sabre-toothed tigers, while my mother and Sally look on. (Hulton Getty)
Top: Outside our first house: 24 The Grove, Uplands, Swansea. (Hulton Getty)
Outside the cottage in West Wratting, just before our period in Cambridge (1961-64). My leanness didn’t last (see following).
Portugal, in 1955. Philip (see bottom right) was much taller than me: people thought that two or three years divided us (rather than 375 days). In the course of this three-month exile (volubly resented but actually enjoyed by KA) Philip once rescued Sally when she was engulfed by a herd of goats. I see it now: him carrying her along above the bobbing horns.
My mother and father in Martha’s Vineyard, 1959.
I am on the far left, tubbily slumped against the car. It is 1962 and I am turning thirteen. From the right: Robert Graves, KA, Tomás Graves, Hilly.
Eva.
Crewcuts and whitewalls: Princeton, 1959. We never used the American names we had prepared for ourselves. Mine was Marty. Adapting one of his middle names, Philip had come up with Nick, Junior.
Phil down the Fulham Road, checking his Vespa, c. 1966, while a rozzer (or ‘tithead’) patrols the pavement.
Sally finishing a salad in Spain: 1973
Barnet, early 1970s. Kingsley is pretending to be a French intellectual and is saying something like, ‘If existence precedes essence …’
Rob (top) and I spent much time (and money) pouting into photo booths. 1967.
(left and right): These are the two photos kept by my desk: Delilah Seale, Lucy Partington.
Marian and Lucy at Fountains Abbey, a month before Lucy disappeared in December 1973.
This Bee Gee dates from 1974. The photograph was taken by the dedicatee of my second novel.
Christopher Hitchens and I are flanking James Fenton: Sacré Coeur, Paris, the winter of 1980. The photograph was taken by my companion of many years, Angela Gorgas.
I and my father are flanking Elizabeth Jane Howard. Hampstead, late 1970s: towards the end. (Dmitri Kasterine/Camera Press)
My parents in the early 1990s.
Anticlockwise from top: Antonia Phillips; Jacob Amis; Louis Amis. We think that these photographs, by Jo Ryan, were taken in late 1990, making Louis just six and Jacob four and a half.
Standing by my father in 1991. (Frank Martin/Guardian)
Larkin. (Fay Godwin/Network)
With Saul and Janis Bellow, Vermont, 1998. For structural reasons the baby I am wielding cannot be named.
Isabel Fonseca on the day after we returned from the Condado Casino in Puerto Rico: January 1995. (Marion Ettlinger)
With unnamed baby, Long Island, 1998. Photograph by Pamela Morgan.
Bruno Fonseca, 1958–1994. Clockwise from top left: 1988 (Luca Vignelli), 1968, and 1994, on the day before he died. The drawing is by his mother, Elizabeth Fonseca
Kingsley with Sarah Snow.
Men, I have noticed, can indeed be indifferent to their surroundings (if not to their geographical location). Women aren’t like that. As my mother would say to me a couple of years later (she was nomadic at the time): ‘If you’re a woman, then you are your house and your house is you.’ I was doubly impressed when Jane, who had no desire to leave, seemed to accept Kingsley’s proposal without argument. ‘No matter how much you’ve put into it,’ she told me, ‘you can’t go on living in a place that makes one of you unhappy.’ I was twenty-six. I thought: this is maturity. This is civilisation. What happened next, however, amounted to a fulminant folie à deux … In the interests of economy Jane decided to dispense with the services of professional house-movers: instead, she would do it all herself. This not only prolonged the agony but hugely vivified it. And the domestic atmosphere was soon close to excruciating. The move had begun with a movie; and here was another motion picture: a long one, with a long title, something like: Moving House, And Very Obviously Moving House, While Very Obviously Not Wanting to Move House, As Husband Looks On. After a while I said,
— Dad, what’s happening here is insane. You’ve got to insist on getting the movers in.
— She says we can’t afford it.
— You’re going from one enormous place to another enormous place. The move would be only a fraction of the sums involved.
— She says we can’t afford it.
— Then go into debt.
— We’ve already gone into debt, apparently.
— Then go deeper.
We fell silent while Jane, with Karloffian gait (Frankenstein, 1931), trudged through the hall, sighing under the weight of a loaded tea-chest. Kingsley looked incapacitated: gently incapacitated. The Amis paralysis was upon him. Of course, there had never been any question of my father ‘lending a hand’, as the saying goes. In any case that would have frustrated Jane’s subliminal purpose, which I can only conclude was sadomasochistic in tendency. ‘My main job so far,’ KA uneasily boasted to Robert Conquest in May, 1976, ‘has been drinking up the nearly-empty bottles’ (‘horrible stuff like cherry vodka, Mavrodaphne, raki etc.’). Later that day, as usual, my father and I set off to drive to the Two Brewers. In the courtyard Jane was struggling to wedge an armchair into the martyred minivan, for yet another round trip to London … She must have hired some muscle at some point: I never saw her carrying a refrigerator or a double bed. One way or the other the thing got done in the end. Finally the Amises were established in the house in Hampstead (listed, freestanding, eighteenth-century, with walled garden front and back), on a massive foundation of resentment. And it would get worse.
When I was going through Girl, 20 the other month I was chilled to see that Kingsley’s evocation of the house on Hadley Common was persistently necrotic. The phrases I am about to quote serve their general purpose in this funny, sad and unautobiographical novel, but I couldn’t avoid seeing them as indices of a dormant disaffection:* the ‘paved courtyard adorned with small trees in a sickly or dead condition’, the old coats on the old coatstand, the empty bottles, ‘the gloom of the barn’, the ‘avenue littered with fallen wood’, the ‘overgrown path that proved to be two or three inches deep in rotting leaves’, ‘the ruins of the greenhouse’, the ‘vases of decaying flowers’. And what am I to make of the fate of the Furry Barrel, a character very closely based on the comical and voluptuous Rosie Plush? Unlike Nancy in The Anti-Death League, Rosie just about survives Girl, 20. The novel ends in divorce and dilapidation; and the narrator (an outsider, making his last visit to the house) sees that the dog, too, has been caught up in this final convulsion, crippled by the child of the breaking home: ‘One hind leg, with what looked like a rubber bandage on it, stuck out at an angle, and there was an arrangement of straps over her rump.’ And what am I to make of this?
I stooped down and stroked the dog’s silky head, feeling as if something dismal had happened right in the middle of my own life and concerns, something major, something irretrievable, as if I had taken a fatally wrong decision years ago and only now seen how much I had lost by it.
Girl, 20 was published in 1971. (My copy is inscribed: ‘To good old graduand Martin. Love from Dad’). The Green Man was published in 1969. So Girl, 20 belongs to 1970.
And this is ‘Wasted’, which appeared in 1973:
That cold winter evening
The fire would not draw,
And the whole family hung
Over the dismal grate
Where rain-soaked logs
Bubbled, hissed and steamed.
Then, when the others had gone
Up to their chilly beds,
And I was ready to go,
The wood began to flame
In clear rose and violet,
Heating the small hearth.
Why should that memory cling
Now t
he children are all grown up,
And the house — a different house —
Is warm at any season?
What is, what has been ‘wasted’? Not just the surge of warmth from the fire, clearly enough. ‘A different house’: there is something dismissive, something warding-off, in the dashes that gird these three words. The poem is about the recurrent grief, endemic to the male divorcee — grief for the lost family. More than that, though, the sadness here is defeatist. It is saying that it wasn’t worth it. The aggregate of familial pain, of familial disconnection: that is what has been wasted.
Around now I hear a subversive voice from the other camp, claiming (with some basis) that it was Kingsley who was wasted, in 1973. And I find that a certain themelet in these pages — the Two Brewers, the cherry vodka, the Mavrodaphne, the raki — is doing its best to intrude. We will, perforce, come back to that … I want to end this subsection with two images of my father’s face. The images are identical, though separated by twenty years. There is a connection between them that I know to be there but cannot quite locate.
First image. This comes in the aftermath of an altercation in the library of the house on Hadley Common. The row, I seem to remember, was tripartite: I was involved in some way, perhaps taking sides (and not necessarily with my father). It ended, anyway, and in the dazed lull that followed Jane reached out impulsively towards Kingsley, who glimpsed her movement late, and flinched as he reflexively raised a protective arm. And then it was Jane’s turn to rear back, in vindicated astonishment, as if to say, ‘See? See how it is with me and you?’ My father’s face: childish, softly frowning, entering a plea for mitigation, for leniency, asking for things to be seen in a kinder light.
The second image. This was Swansea, and I had been sent upstairs to be beaten, or at any rate hit, by my father in his tiny study at the end of the long corridor. The long corridor, the tiny, tawny study facing the steeply sloped back garden: that means we were still at 24 The Grove, and hadn’t yet moved up the hill to Glanmore Road, making me unbelievably and embarrassingly young to have committed such crimes — six and three-quarters at the outside. More and more recklessly I had been stealing money and cigarettes from my mother’s handbag and coat pocket. I knew a reckoning was coming. Earlier that day, almost legless with apprehension and self-disgust, I had secreted a handful of stolen change under a bench in a bus shelter — and gone home, where my mother told me to present myself at my father’s study, to be hit … I remember the increasing gloom of the corridor. I knocked (we always knocked). He stood with his back to me at the window. He turned — with the significant face. What happened next is darkly shadowed and escapes all memory. My mind knows nothing about it. Afterwards he said: ‘What do you want to do now?’ I said: ‘I want to go to bed.’ It was a summer evening. Plenty of fervently hurrying footsteps in the street, and people calling out to one another with a buoyancy and hopefulness unimaginable in the nighttime … As for the cancelled memory of the beating: the void is so perfect and entire that I sometimes suspect it never happened. But I would have remembered its not happening. And my mother told me he wept that night, as he always did when he hit us.*
He turned from the study window. His face was in quarter-profile (and shouldn’t this have been my face?): childish, softly frowning, entering a plea for mitigation, for leniency, asking for things to be seen in a kinder light.
Although, in the novels, with their permanent blitzkrieg against bores and boredom, pointmissers, poseurs, much violence is summoned, hammers, pokers, bayonets, knuckledusters, flaming stakes, swarming anthills, starving crocodiles (Dad. Yes? If three anthills and two crocodiles …), firearms, mortars, flamethrowers (this list is by no means complete), together with common assault (‘Ronnie had been standing for about half a minute … considering whether to run up and hit Mansfield a lot would convey to him something of what he felt about him’), Kingsley was in some sense a profoundly unviolent man. He didn’t leave my mother and he didn’t leave Jane. They left him. Divorce ‘is an incredibly violent thing to happen to you’. Above all he feared escalation.
The Pain Schedule
‘We’ll have a ball yet,’ Bellow kept saying when, still numb from the monotone of Haifa, we were all temporarily gazumped at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the official guesthouse, and had to cast about for a hotel. And we did have a ball. There was a dinner, an occasion where I felt a liveliness that went beyond the excitement guaranteed by the location: Jerusalem, the city without smalltalk. That night the dramatis personae, it now seems, was drawn up with ominous care: my wife and I, Saul and Janis, Allan Bloom (the political philosopher), Teddy Kolleck (the city Mayor) and Amschel and Anita Rothschild. Bloom and I had a long, loud, and in the end unrancorous argument about nuclear weapons.* I climbed down, carefully, that night. I saw all the deep attractions of escalation, of arsenal-clearing escalation. For a while, as in a countdown tingler set in the Situation Room, I stood on the brink and saw the abyss. But down I climbed. There are times when manners are more important than the end of the world. In fact I often felt myself among my elders and betters in Israel, and I was furtively honoured to be staying in the city guesthouse — where Bloom and the Bellows seemed to me to be rightfully installed. I was attracted by Bloom’s demeanour (one of constant expectation of amusement) and the physical greed with which he went through his Marlboros. And I was alive to the pleasure Saul took in him. Their friendship was a nice sight: two fugitives from Ulysses (Bloom, Moses Herzog), happily conspiring … Teddy Kolleck tended to disappear between courses and then potently rematerialise, his city so much the calmer or the more solvent after some appearance he had put in or phone call he had made. The young Rothschilds — old friends of mine despite their youth — were also engaged in that (to me) mysterious arena of power and public relations, of endowments, of pro-bono unveilings. ‘I’m the Princess Di of Israel,’ said Anita (née Guinness), semi-seriously: ‘I am.’ Her husband Amschel looked on with his usual unassertive benignity, his usual (curiously elastic) physical elegance, his hot brown eyes. What did we talk about? Israel. I didn’t want the evening to end.
The next day at Mishkenot Sha’ananim I sent Bellow a note. In a spirit of extreme diffidence. I think I know as well as anyone that writers are always nursing and protecting a preoccupation. ‘We are usually waiting,’ as he says, ‘for someone to clear out and let us go on with the business of life (to cultivate the little obsessional garden).’ No writer has inveighed so feelingly against distraction (‘What is going on will not let us alone’); and I suspected, once again, that I was there as a representative of the moronic inferno, which is distraction. So my note to Saul, I repeat, was tentatively couched. ‘Towards the end of your life,’ says Benn Crader in More Die of Heartbreak,
you have something like a pain schedule to fill out — a long schedule like a federal document, only it’s your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes — like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. Next category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much, and you see the ravages everywhere, why not be sensible and sign off early?
In my note, therefore, I asked after the state of Bellow’s pain schedule,* saying that I had no wish to add to it, but if he should happen to — unless of course he …
He replied, and we had afternoon tea at the guesthouse (me milk, him lemon) on a balcony or rooftop in the undecided landscape of Jerusalem, tropical, barren, rubbish-laden. It was our first entirely non-professional encounter; and in a way I wish I had had the tools of my sometime trade about me: the pen, the notebook, the taperecorder to stare at distrustfully, the trembling hands.* Because I don’t remember what we talked about. But I can guess. It has often been said of Saul Bellow that he speaks just as he writes. In my view this couldn’t be an accurate description of any literary novelist (and think how grotesque it would be to say it of a poet). Still, it is mo
re nearly true of him than of any other writer I have known. His speech shows the same habits of rhythm, the same vigilance and circumspection together with the same willingness to ascend and expand.† Talking to him, that day, was not so very different from curling up with Mr Sammler’s Planet (the sense of being plugged into a talent), and this suggests no passivity on my part. Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with Herzog, with Henderson, with Humboldt, frowning, nodding, withholding, qualifying, objecting, conceding — and smiling, smiling first with reluctant admiration, then smiling with unreluctant admiration. That’s how it was on the rooftop in Jerusalem. And that’s how it was last night (18/7/99), long-distance, when I sat in a London kitchen and reread Seize the Day.